The Cellar - Man Caves

This isn't exactly Current Events, and it is sort of entertaining, but I put it here. This is sort of in my back yard, certainly my old stomping grounds. Another news story reported that hte guys changed OGS (Office of General Services) to Office of Ganja Services.

At a conference of New Urbanist planners and theorists, in 2006, the architect Andrés Duany identified a budding crisis in American life: the decline of “male space,” which he defined as zones “where the enthusiasms of Super Bowl day are unchecked year-round,” and where “the men are not factually corrected when they exaggerate.” The den, with its knotty-pine panelling and mounted moose heads, used to suffice, before it was subjected to a cultural makeover and emerged as the “family room,” relegating Dad to the garage. Then Sheetrock and the Container Store, with its “completely insidious” plastic cabinets, conspired to feminize the garage, and man was effectively neutered. The recession hasn’t helped. Men, according to Forbes, are dropping out of the workforce in disproportionate numbers, only to discover that they lack refuge.

Which brings us to Albany, site of the great political tragicomedy of the summer, and last week’s news that state police had raided an illicit rec room in the Capitol complex. The Inspector General’s office, in a press release announcing the discovery, called it a “man cave,” conjuring up images of a dimly lit basement with stained upholstery and an overabundance of electronics. Using tarps, a couple of janitorial workers on the night shift had cordoned off a corner of a state-owned parking garage, which was stocked with sofas, fridges, a TV, and the latest copy of Cannabis Culture. There, while on the clock, they allegedly watched DVDs of “M*A*S*H,” rolled joints, and napped, confirming the worst stereotypes of government workers and also of Albany: even the men responsible for literally cleaning up the Capitol’s mess turn out to have been under the sway of a corrupting influence, playing hooky. (The men deny any wrongdoing and call the hubbub overblown.) The same day the Post took note of the cave, it reported poor attendance records for fourteen elected members of the State Assembly—this, after nearly five weeks in which the State Senate allowed a partisan dispute to prevent it from addressing any legislation at all.
“These cats were escaping a code of behavior that probably was not male enough,” Duany said the other day. He’d seen a picture of the janitors’ lair, and likened it to the Victorian idea of a growlery: a room in which to grouch and put your feet up. “If females had inhabited this space, and outfitted it with neat chairs and a mirror and a makeup cabinet, it would be, ‘Oh, the poor women; it’s because we didn’t give them a sitting room,’ ” he said. “There would be absolute sympathy.” Instead, there is outrage, over the twenty-eight thousand dollars in overtime paid to the cavemen in the past five years.
Some leavening perspective does seem to be in order. One of the janitors, after nine years on the job, was earning less than thirty thousand dollars a year. Meanwhile, a pay-to-play scandal haunts the hundred-billion-dollar state pension fund. Duany granted that the “New York Senate scene seems pretty male,” but called the level of discourse that occurs in government “superficially civilized,” and pointed to the removal of spittoons and canes as a contributing factor in the decline. “The public life is oppressive,” he said. “Men need to be able to refine their ‘fish that got away’ stories, exaggerating without bragging. It’s about what a pathetic creature you are. ‘I saw the most beautiful bear, and I missed, because I tripped over my underwear.’ ”
“This is not a trivial subject,” Duany added. “We worry about the thirteen per cent African-Americans and fifteen per cent Hispanics. Well, there’s fifty per cent males who are very ill served by our physical environment.” Those fifty per cent, it may be worth noting, include Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor, who was moved, long before he fled to his mistress in Argentina, to dig giant holes in his back yard. He needed a cave. ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/0...#ixzz192L4iwPo